Clear skies for CCA graduates’ takeoff

Even the sky turned blue and white for Cape Cod Academy’s class of 2012.

Ellen Chahey

EDWARD F. MARONEY PHOTOS

STEPPING UP – Lexi Smith receives an award from the faculty’s Madam Forth.

Class of 2012 told wealth is not the path to success

Even the sky turned blue and white for Cape Cod Academy’s class of 2012.

As a picture-perfect June day unfolded around them, the 27 seniors marched into a big white tent on Seapuit Field in Osterville led by bagpiper Peter Welch. The girls wore white dresses, each unique to her personal style, and the boys sported navy blazers and crisp chinos. Their march took them down an aisle lined with friends and relatives ranging from babies to the elderly.

The Rev. Lawrence W. Brown, a humanities teacher at the school, offered a remembrance of community members who have died and then read part of a Celtic-themed poem often called “St. Patrick’s Breastplate.”

The close-knit quality of the small school came to light as David W. McGraw, chair of the board of trustees, said in his welcome that he was the parent of three CCA alumni, and later Phillip Petru, head of school, identified his two little girls as “class of 2024” and “class of 2026,” respectively. (The academy has recently opened a preschool, which can theoretically extend a student’s stay there beyond the 13 K-12 years. At this graduation, five students were recognized for attending from kindergarten, and another five for attending from grade five or six.)

The senior speaker, Fisher M. Churbuck, was one of those who attended CCA from kindergarten. “I am not the valedictorian,” he said in a lighthearted moment, “but here due to the impeccable judgment of my friends.”

Churbuck said that in eighth grade, he considered going to a boarding school as had his older siblings, “and I did look at some walls with more ivy growing on them,” but in the end his chose CCA and even became a guide for the admissions department. He said that one of his pleasures as an upper school student was to recognize some of the young people he’d shown around now enrolled at CCA.

Keith M. Lewison, a social studies teacher, gave the faculty address to the class he called the first one he taught at CCA. “You’re living in a time of both interconnectedness and isolation…at risk is nothing short of the future of Western civilization…American wealth has blinded us. We spend more on lawn care than India collects in taxes, or than the whole GNP of Vietnam,” he cautioned.

But he shared a guidepost for hope: the way Danes gathered forces to insure the survival of Jews during the Holocaust. No one factor alone saved 99 percent of the Danish Jews, he said, but a “convergence of personal and cultural factors” resulted in “a spontaneous event” in which individuals took responsibility for one another.

“Wealth is not the path to success,” said Lewison. “Seek quiet in a world that is never quiet. Read much more, and discuss what you read. Learn as much as you can about the brokenness around you, and apply your creativity.”

When the new alumni had their diplomas, head of school Petru told them, “Now we have given you all we can give, and we are going to turn our attention to those who come after you, and you are going on to the next chapters in your lives.”

Then the bagpiper led the new alumni out of the tent, and under the blue and white sky, the Cape Cod Academy school bell chimed loudly and for a long time.

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